What Can Quantum Computing Do To Healthcare?

Quantum computing might bring supersonic drug design, in silico clinical trials with virtual humans simulated ‘live’, full-speed whole genome sequencing and analytics, the movement of hospitals to the cloud, the achievement of predictive health, or the security of medical data via quantum uncertainty. However, for a few interested folks, you should actually tell the story of how Google’s 54-qubit computer was able to complete a task in 200 seconds that Google estimated would take over 10,000 years for non-quantum, traditional computers. Still, how does quantum computing differ from regular computing? While we don’t really want to go down the rabbit hole of technicalities as the team is rather far off from quantum physics, as far as we understand it, this is not just a better and faster way of computing – it has a fundamentally different basis.

It isn’t by chance that quantum computers don’t measure their performance in bits, but qubits – while the former represents either ones or zeros, and thus the mathematical description of problems, the latter signifies states, which can simultaneously take up ones and zeros, or anything in-between. As phenomena in nature are not necessarily describable by ones and zeros, quantum computing could open up better ways to simulate nature. And as the previously mentioned light bulb had the potential to completely transform society, quantum computers have a truly revolutionary way to impact many parts of our lives – including medicine, pharma, and healthcare. Quantum computing is developing rapidly, as we can see from recent announcements. Bringing quantum computers into research communities will allow collaboration towards the advancement of the development of quantum computing, novel quantum algorithms and applications by validating the use-cases in real-world settings. Quantum computers are a thing. Running searches on quantum computers could unfold looking through all possible molecules at unimaginable speed for drug target tests conducted in every potential cell model or in silico human tissues and networks in the shortest amount of time possible. We believe that quantum computing could give a significant push to the area: faster sequencing, as well as a more comprehensive and faster analysis of the entire genome, will be possible with it. Plus, predictions will be more reliable as quantum computers could take into account even more information as traditional computers, and they could even build every piece of genomic data into health records.

Quantum computing could take out the guesswork from genomics and genetics for ensuring better health for everyone. Quantum computers will be able to make sense of these huge amounts of data, including bits and pieces of health information. Using quantum computers, fed with huge amounts of health parameters, genetic information, sensory data, and other personal health information, might be able to give a comprehensive prediction about a given person’s future health. Quantum computing would take that to a whole new level and even augment it with special skills. At the very endpoint of this development, quantum computers could create an elevated version of PubMed, where information would reside in the system but not in the traditional written form, but in qubits of data as no one except the computer would ‘read’ the studies anymore. In her TED talk, Shohini Ghose mentioned the use of quantum uncertainty for encryption as one of the most probable applications of quantum computing. Quantum computing has indeed amazing potential – in theory. Plus, another problem with quantum computing is that very few people know what it means and understand its workings completely.